Connie night dive Aug 22

[blee]

Buddy and I are thinking of doing a night dive this Sat (tomorrow), rain or no rain, since we haven't managed to do one this year yet. Anyone else interested?

[owlbill]

I am planning to be there about 7:30 tomorrow potentially with 3 AOW students.

[blee]

Nice dive. We were the only divers on the site, and the locals passing through had disappeared by sundown, so it made for a very quiet evening.

The weather turned out exceptionally well, with no rain. It was warmer than forecast during the day, and it was still 26C as we drove off the spit. The clouds had also started to part while we were under. There are definitely more stars in the country than in the city. Fortunately, with the sun down, it was cool enough that you could actually still walk about in a 7 mm wetsuit without passing out from heat prostration.

Water temps were in the mid-70s, and it was like diving in your own little hot tub, inside a 7 mm wetsuit, even without peeing. Vis wasn't great, though. Maybe 15' which even limited how much of the wreck you could see from the surface, as we snorkeled over before sundown. Heck of a lot of weeds, though. Has there been little dive traffic there for the last couple of weeks? For a change, we went down from the SOS buoy, and underneath, it was this massive bundle of vegetation over a metre tall and more than half that in diameter. There was a decent current (maybe 0.5 kt), and I finally gave up trying to find the line and just started clambering down the jungle. Wish I'd brought a camera, but who takes a camera on a night dive when you don't have any strobes?

Not as many fish as I remember from previous night dives. Don't know if the warm water is driving them deeper. Mostly a couple of dozen fairly placid large (maybe up to 18-20") smallmouth bass (I think) scattered about, with a small number of unidentified two-inchers hovering near the limits of visibility. There wasn't the school of smaller things underneath the smokestack, that I remember from previous years.